All dogs go to heaven...

Princess Gracie Belle was our St. Bernard, and she was born on Nov.
5, 1999. She's been gone for 6 years now and we miss her everyday.

We
brought Gracie home when she was 6 weeks old, and she was a 10 lb. ball
of fur. She started growing, and growing, and growing...

At
9 months, she was bigger than a lot of adult dogs. A big dog with the
energy of a puppy. A very, very big puppy that drooled a lot.

By
the time she was a couple of years old, she weighed 150 lbs. But she
had no concept of her size. She would try to sit on our laps. No - there
was no trying - she sat on our
laps. Of course, she never noticed that she was taking up the entire
couch - all she cared about was laying on one of us. She could do some
serious damage just by wagging her tail. Which she did. Often. We had to
keep everything off the end tables because her tail would just knock
everything on the floor. Too bad I couldn't get her to do the dusting
for me.

She thought that any food at her head level was
hers. One time, I put a grilled cheese sandwich on the bed (this was a
large king-sized bed that was almost at my waist level), and when I came
back a minute later I didn't see it. I looked everywhere for it,
thinking that maybe I had put it somewhere else. But then I saw her
standing there looking at me and I realized that she had eaten the whole
thing. Another time, she scarfed two pieces of pizza off the dining
room table before you could say "pepperoni or cheese".

Now
we have a 16X20 canvas portrait of her hanging in our foyer. It only
seemed right to have her here in the new house (we moved about a year
after she died) with us. We all have mementos of her - I keep her collar
in my desk. She was a sweetheart.